Lagom without ConductR?

Question

Is it practical or wise to use Lagom in production without ConductR? The commercial licensing is putting me off. This framework looks like it could be pretty arduous to deploy and custom tooling for that can take a lot of effort to get right.

Hexyl

Lightbend has left these production specific tools and implementations open ended in the open source version of Lagom. You can implement a ServiceLocator yourself and manage autoscaling, logging and the like yourself using other open source tools like Consul and Nomad for example. Lightbend makes it easier for you to just commit to ConductR by providing all these implementations out of the box with a great SLA backing it. They have recently acquired OpsClarity which, I believe, is bundled in their commercial package. – Skedaddle

@Hexyl Did you find a ConductR replacement? – Macymad

Answer 1

(disclaimer: I'm a Lightbend employee, currently core member of the Lagom team)

Edit (Nov 2018): Please refer to https://www.lagomframework.com/documentation/current/java/ProductionOverview.html#Running-Lagom-in-production for up to date information on this topic.

(original answer, Aug 2017) A lot has changed in the Lightbend stack since this question was added over a year ago. For example: ConductR is now free to use in production for up to three nodes. Also, the team behind ConductR is also working on providing tools to deploy a Lagom application on Kubernetes. The efforts on that front are very advanced and some of our sample apps can be deployed in Kubernetes already.

Printmaking

Answer 2

Your question is rather open-ended and so let's start with "it depends".

If

• you're comfortable managing your scaling within the configuration of your Akka cluster,
• your usage doesn't violate the open-source licensing terms of lagom, play and Akka, AND
• you don't have sufficient cash flow to justify leveraging Lightbend's production suite,

then you arguably can deploy with a minimum of effort and custom tooling.

If those conditions don't hold, your options are to go elsewhere (e.g., Spring Cloud) or retain Lightbend. You may find going elsewhere has it's own cognitive load and/or commercial expense.

Hope that helps even 7 months later.

Birdcage

Answer 3

The other answers are higher level, but I can essentially say "yes." I'm currently deploying a Lagom service to be hosted on a Kubernetes cluster, and I'm not using ConductR or any of the commerically licensed components.

You will need to dig a little bit into some Play internals to start the service properly, and if you want to hook in with some other service locator you may need to implement one yourself, but it certainly isn't impossible and I think it's less effort on net.

Liebowitz

Answer 4

Being honest it really worth to pay, because you got much more, good reporting dashboards, automatic cluster formation and what really cool is split brain resolver....

But sometimes agree when you are working on a project that don't have a lot of money, you can do some small tricks and get it work and may be then do all what really lucks or buy enterprise subscription.

So Lagom can be very easy being used without service discovery at all if you will delegate all to Kubernetes DNS or without Kubernetes just put load balancer before each service and use its address.

How this can works

Each lagom service that you have should be external service

1. Production run configuration should be mixed with

ConfigurationServiceLocatorComponents

2. Service that should communicate with another one should be started with extra parameter that tell lagom that this service is external one and can be communicated directly(all can be in JAVA_OPTS as for play application)

-Dlagom.services.your_service_name=http://k8s_service_name.default.svc.cluster.local:9000

Demetri